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Java is a useful tool but with drawbacks. Now a company launched at the crest of the Java wave has announced its first products which look like being Java's Next Big Step. Marimba (http://www.marimba.com) was founded in February this year by four members of the original Java development team at Sun Microsystems: Kim Polese, Arthur van Hoff, Jonathan Payne and Sami Shaio. The first fruits of this new company are Castanet and Bongo.”

Presents 35 abstracts from the 2001 Employment Research Unit Annual conference held at Cardiff Business School in September 2001. Attempts to explore the theme of changing politics of employment relations beyond and within the nation state, against a background of concern in the developed economies at the erosion of relatively advanced conditions of work and social welfare through increasing competition and international agitation for more effective global labour standards. Divides this concept into two areas, addressing the erosion of employment standards through processes of restructuring and examining attempts by governments, trade unions and agencies to re‐create effective systems of regulation. Gives case examples from areas such as India, Wales, London, Ireland, South Africa, Europe and Japan. Covers subjects such as the Disability Discrimination Act, minimum wage, training, contract workers and managing change.

Delineating where stability occurs in a contract provides the window of opportunity for procurement officials to positively affect cost and schedule outcomes. While the concept of a Cost Performance Index (CPI) "stability rule" has been routinely cited by Earned Value Management (EVM) authors since the early 1990's, more recent research questions the veracity of this stability rule. This paper resolves the controversy by demonstrating that the definition of stability matters. We find a morphing of the stability definition over time, with three separate definitions permeating the literature. Next, an analysis of Department of Defense contracts for both cost and schedule stability properties finds that the veracity of the stability rule is intricately tied to the definition used.

Recent legislation resulted in an elevation of operating and support (O&S) costs’ relative importance for decision-making in Department of Defense programs. However, a lack of research in O&S hinders a cost analyst’s abilities to provide accurate sustainment estimates. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate when Air Force aircraft O&S costs stabilize and to what degree. Next, a parametric O&S model is developed to predict median O&S costs for use as a new tool for cost analyst practitioners.

Utilizing the Air Force total ownership cost database, 44 programs consisting of 765 observations from 1996 to 2016 are analyzed. First, stability is examined in three areas: total O&S costs, the six O&S cost element structures and by aircraft type. Next, stepwise regression is used to predict median O&S costs per total active inventory (CPTAI) and identify influential variables.

Stability results vary by category but generally are found to occur approximately five years from initial operating capability. The regression model explains 89.01 per cent of the variance in the data set when predicting median O&S CPTAI. Aircraft type, location of lead logistics center and unit cost are the three largest contributing factors.

Results from this research provide insight to cost analysts on when to start using actual O&S costs as a baseline for estimates in lieu of analogous cost program data and also derives a new parametric O&S estimating tool designed as a cross-check to current estimating methodologies.

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

This study draws parallels between the Major and Johnson eras to reclaim a discursive space beyond the media and political battlefields to examine long-term systemic failure of government PR.

As part of a wider study into government communications from 1979 to date, this paper draws on evidence from government archives from the 1990s, as well as contemporary accounts, official documents, media accounts, memoirs and biographies, to examine the PR record of two Conservative administrations divided by three decades.

News management during the Major premiership is worth serious scrutiny, not just as an interlude between two media-friendly Prime Ministers, Thatcher and Blair, but in comparison to Boris Johnson's struggle to contain the news narrative between 2019 and 2022. Both administrations experienced terminal reputational crises during their closing years but their means of managing the news were counter-productive and damaging to public trust (65).

Does this failure in public communication illustrate a systemic dysfunction in government-media relations and, if so, what is the role of government PR in these circumstances?

This article uses a comparison between fixed and moving variables associated with two very different administrations to identify the causes of ongoing systemic failure in government communication.